Archives for May 2018

We live in the era of fake news, and in the world of coffee there’s certainly a lot of misinformation about Turkish coffee. But we’re here to set the record straight about the syrupy, sludgy cup of coffee.

Turkish Coffee is a Brew Method

Turkish coffee is a way of preparing coffee, not a coffee origin. The Republic of Turkey produces tea along its Black Sea coast, but the climate isn’t suitable for coffee. During the Ottoman Empire, Turks controlled Yemen and its coffee trade, holding a virtual monopoly on the coffee trade. But the Dutch managed to smuggle a few seeds out and coffee soon spread around the world. For the last hundred years or so most of Turkey’s coffee imports have come from Brazil….

Dave Eggers has always been connected with specialty coffee in my mind. I purchased my first Eggers’s novel from Quills Coffee and Books on Kentucky St. in Louisville’s Paristown neighborhood. (Due to a bad landlord situation the shop closed. When it reopened on nearby Baxter Avenue, the “and Books” was dropped from everything but legal documents). The book was What is the What, a novel based on the true story of a Sudanese refugee who barely escapes his village being slaughtered by rebels and eventually gets to America, where he encounters hardships of a different kind. To this day, whenever someone mentions Eggers I’m transported back to that small corner café, with Quills’s distinctive red mug and a coffee-stained book.

It turns out the association between Eggers and coffee was misguided but strangely prescient. Eggers latest book, The Monk of Mokha, chronicles the true story of Mokhtar Alkhanshali, the founder of …

Few people could have predicted the way specialty coffee has boomed in Istanbul over the last five years. It wasn’t that long ago you could count the number of specialty coffee shops in Turkey’s largest city on your fingers. Now that list is well over 60, and the lion’s share of those cafés have a La Marzocco espresso machine on bar.

The Florence-manufactured espresso machines are truly an icon of contemporary coffee culture, especially in brand-conscious Istanbul, where a La Marzocco espresso machine often symbolizes a larger commitment to quality. But the machines are not just on display in cafés anymore….

With the most pessimistic reports predicting the near extinction of arabica coffee in the next fifty years due to climate change, the specialty coffee industry has an invested interest in reducing coffee’s environmental impact. But most coffee roasters utilize technology that is more or less a century old, and far from fuel efficient. A conventional drum roaster burns a lot of fossil fuels, not to mention the by-products that are put into the atmosphere. But a new in-shop roaster from Bellwether Coffee aims to change the way the industry roasts coffee. We interviewed Bellwether Coffee’s COO Arno Holschuh to find out how their zero-emissions roaster works, and why he thinks it could disrupt a whole industry.

Bellwether Coffee is manufacturing the first zero–emissions coffee roaster. I’m sure your technology is proprietary, but can you tell us something about how the roaster works?

I can tell lots of things about how it works! For starters, our roaster uses a fixed-drum roasting architecture. This is also known as the “modified drum” architecture. What I mean is that the roasting drum is made out of stainless steel and does not rotate; the beans are mixed to assure even roasting by “paddles” that lift the beans off the drum surface and loft them into the air. (This design was popularized by …

Last year, the December Dripper emerged on the scene with a simple but revolutionary design. The brewing device uses a silicon gasket to adjust the flow rate with a simple twist. One of the more interesting applications of this design feature is making flash-chilled iced coffee– sometimes called Japanese iced coffee or an iced pour-over.

The biggest problem with brewing over a bed of ice is that it’s difficult to get a full extraction. The best iced pour-overs are light and bright with a lively acidity, but they lack the deep sweetness of a fully extracted coffee. The ability to slow and even stop the flow rate with the December Dripper means you can …

Small coffee roasters face numerous challenges, but Turkish roasters face a bigger obstacle: access to quality green coffee. Most coffee in Turkey is imported twice: first by an European or American importer, that by a roaster in Turkey. Martell Mason, an American expat based in Istanbul, is trying to change that. Arabica Trading House is one of the first specialty coffee importing companies to import coffee directly from origin into Turkey. We met up with Mason at ATH’s office in Çukurcuma to find out what inspired him to move from Oslo to Istanbul….

Long time readers of The Compass will remember our first post highlighted an exciting new espresso bar in Downtown Louisville. That espresso bar, of course, was the third retail location for Louisville specialty coffee pioneers Sunergos Coffee. Just shy of 6 years later, the Sunergos retail family is growing again, though their fourth location couldn’t be a sharper contrast from the closet-sized standing room-only espresso bar, in the shadow of Michael Graves’s famed Humana Tower. Sunergos Norris place occupies a refurbished garage, in quiet Deer Park. We caught up with Sunergos’s co-owner Matthew Huested to find out how the project came together….